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Wednesday, January 04, 2017

How to Control Your Philips Hue Lights with Siri

Want to control to your Philips Hue Lights? How do you control your Philips Hue Lights with Siri?With Apple’s HomeKit home automation system and the flexibility of Siri, you can now control your home lighting with your voice. You can easily use Siri to control your Philips Hue Lights with out stressing yourself. All it takes to set it up is just a few clicks and taps.Here’s how to use Siri to control your Philips Hue Lights.RequirementsTo control your smart home lighting, you first of all need to have some important things. The first you need is an iOS device running on the latest version of iOS or at least 9.0 which also have support for HomeKit.You’ll also need a HomeKit-enabled light system like the Philips Hue Lights we are talking about. We are using the Philips Hue 2nd-generation system in this guide which is an updated bridge that supports HomeKit.Now in case you were a Hue early adopter, you can of course keep your existing Hue bulbs however you will have to upgrade your 1st-gen Hue Bridge to a 2nd-gen model for this to work.How to Set Up Siri Control for Philips HueThe next thing to do now is to set it up on your iOS device. Now ensure you set this up on the iOS device you are using yourself or in your house. That is the iOS device which you used to control the home automation stuff and your Apple ID is logged into, since HomeKit is connected to your iCloud login. You shouldn’t use any other person’s iPhone/iPad to set up your Homekit settings since they have their own iCloud ID. If you are to use it, then you’d need to always use their iPhone/iPad to make some changes and you have to share the person’s Homekit configuration settings with your other devices instead of you sharing the Homekit setup with other devices as the controlling agent. In case you’ve mistakenly set up your Homekit system under the wrong iCloud ID, you can just reset the Homekit configuration on the iOS device you mistakenly used to set it up.So ensure you set it up on the iOS device you’ll be using to control the Philips Hue Lights and under the correct iCloud ID.To do this, open the Hue app on your iOS device. Then tap on the Settings button at the top-left corner of the screen.Then tap “Siri voice control”.Then tap on “Pair bridge” at the bottom corner.So in case you haven’t set up the HomeKit, then you’ll be asked to create a “home” and give it any name you want. Then tap on “Create home” when you’re done.Now you’ll be asked to scan the number on the back of your Hue Bridge unit, however you can also enter the number manually by just tapping on “Enter Code Manually”. After scanning or enter in the code manually, wait for a few seconds. Once the pairing process is successful, you’ll then be taken to the the Siri voice control menu where you can control which lights, rooms, and scenes you want to use with Siri. In case, it does not sync properly with Siri because some may not, you can tap on the orange dot at the right side to fix it.You can tap on the check boxes beside the rooms that have orange exclamation points to fix the sync issues. And in case you don’t want these rooms connected to Siri, you can just leave them like that.Once you are true with everything, head back to the previous screen and tap on “Done” at the top-right corner to save changes mad.Many HomeKit-enabled systems and apps have different methods of collection, however the universal method is that you can always select groupings (usually known as scenes, rooms, or zones depending on how they are structured within the app and individual components of the system such as the separate light bulbs.How to Control Your Philip Hue LightsAfte r setting up the Homekit on your iOS device and you’ve gone through the hassle of setting up the physical system and linking the Hue app to your HomeKit system, and then it’s just a matter of issuing the right commands to Siri.Another thing to note here before we continue is that some of these devices names can be tricky because some are part of other common commands in Siri. For example, if you name the bedroom lamp on your spouse’s side of the bed “Nicole Lamp”, Siri will want to do something related to Nicole’s contact information or anything Nicole the time you mentioned “Nicole” in a voice command. The same goes for any words that sound like they’re related to calendar actions like today, tonight, Tuesday and so on. So naming a scene “Movie Mode” or just “Movies” is much safer, since it is very unlikely to cause any Siri-related commands confusion.Once you’ve settled you can then proceed and know the right commands to use.Below are the following commands you can use to communicate with Siri and your Philips Hue light system:“Turn all lights [on/off]”“Turn [light name] [on/off]”“Turn the [room] lights [on/off]”“Set [scene name]”” Set lights to [X %] brightness”“Set lights [color]” (This works only on Hue color bulbs)“Set scene [scene name]” (You can add “scene” to the command to make it work well)Of course, there are many other commands you can use. Hue’s documentation doesn’t even include all of the above commands mentioned, however these are commands we’ve used and tested. You may discover some other useful commands while using it. So in case you have other commands that are not mentioned in this article, you can share with us in the comment below.